Off-season works and maintenance: your September–October action plan
Between the last August booking and the opening of the ski season, you have an eight-to-ten-week window. It is the only time of year when building work costs you no nights. Owners who plan it in July get through winter without a technical incident; the rest improvise in December, at the worst possible moment.
Why the shoulder season is your only real works window
In the Alps, September and October account for under 8 % of a resort property's annual revenue. Taking the unit offline for three weeks costs the equivalent of two peak-season nights — against ten to fifteen days of lost income if the same breakdown happens in February. It is also when local trades are actually available: from November their diaries fill up with new-build handovers and lead times balloon. A hot water cylinder replacement booked in late September is done within ten days; the same job as an emergency at Christmas means two to three weeks' wait, a cancelled booking and a bad review. Block your works dates in the calendar in July, before you even open winter bookings.
The end-of-season audit: what to inspect
A serious audit runs appliance by appliance, room by room. Heating first: bleed the radiators, check boiler pressure, and have the stove or insert swept — keep the certificate for your insurer. Then plumbing: shower seals, hoses, traps, plus shut-off and draining if the property sits empty through frost. Next the building envelope: roof-window seals, gutters, window joinery. Those three items cause most winter water damage. Finally the guest-facing kit: washing machine, dishwasher, mattresses, sofa bed, smart lock and batteries, wifi and real throughput. Photograph every defect and centralise it in one dated document. That file becomes your budget arbitration base and your evidence in any dispute.
Repair, replace or upgrade: how to arbitrate
Not every audit line carries the same weight. Sort them into three tiers. Safety and compliance come first, no debate: smoke alarms, chimney sweeping, electrics, gas certification. Then functional wear — a mattress over seven years old, a sagging sofa, scaled-up taps — which does not stop you letting but drags down cleanliness and comfort scores, and with them your pricing power. Last comes the upgrade tier: premium bedding, lighting, hotel-grade linen, a heated ski store. A useful rule: invest in what guests touch and photograph. A €700 mattress that lifts your rating from 4.5 to 4.8 pays for itself in one season through average nightly rate; a new boiler is invisible, but it prevents the cancellation that costs three times as much.
How SmartStay runs your off-season
We carry out an end-of-season technical audit on every property we manage, with a dated photo report and a costed line-by-line breakdown, sorted into urgent, recommended and optional. You approve the budget in a single read, then we coordinate our local trade network — heating engineers, plumbers, electricians and decorators we work with year-round across Savoie, Haute-Savoie and Lyon. We block the calendar on works dates so no booking lands mid-project, we handle access and sign-off, and we send you the invoices and certificates to keep on file. The property reopens cleaned, tested and freshly photographed, ready for winter sales to go live.
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